IBM Says the C-Suite is Ready to Invest Further in Mobile Solutions

IBM Reported on Friday that 84% of CIOs see “mobile solutions as a critical investment to get closer to customers. This enthusiasm for mobile apps is exceeded in the C-Suite by CMOs, according to IBM’s research. 94% of CMOs see mobile solutions as critical to marketing strategies.

IBM’s reports pick up on enterprise mobility themes that we have been emphasizing here for a long time. Certain aspects of enterprise mobility are indeed challenging and these include:

Security of Mobile Apps and Mobile Infrastructure. While MDM and MAM solutions can provide an enterprise with the mobile infrastructure security they need and desire, mobile app security is often overlooked by many IT organizations and left to the developers who create the apps. In reality, many mobile developers are relatively new to IT organizations, have little background in security, and lack the platform support needed to build secure apps on a consistent basis.

Interoperability, Connectivity and Integration. Mobile application IDEs, especially those that can create native apps, are notoriously vapid when it comes to interfaces with enterprise software such as ERP, CRM, SCM, logistics, PLM, HRMS, etc. Without
paired integration solutions for their mobile frameworks, developers are expected to reinvent the wheel or switch between programming languages to create hard-coded, brittle integration bridges between apps. Creating offline mode apps without application platform can be particularly challenging as well. While the IBM report preaches “always on” apps, IBM’s strategy for achieving online apps is unclear.

Fault Tolerance. IBM calls it resiliency. No matter, the ability to design mobile apps that can survive error conditions, exceptions and network outages is desperately needed. Platform level support for inter-application and intra-application error handling and recovery is critical in a connected, mobile world. In addition to in-memory computing techniques, grids that support failover for high availability are also crucial.

Business Process Execution: Support of a mobile application infrastructure requires platform side solutions that are robust in terms of their ability to orchestrate business rules within an app and business processes between mobile apps and enterprise systems. I like the pairing of application development platforms with application integration platforms for this reason: together they can handle any business rule or business process requirement including high speed transformation of streaming Big Data pools of information.

With so many large and midsize enterprises ready to invest heavily in
mobile app frameworks that accelerate app development and ensure secure, integrated, resilient, and efficiently optimized mobile environments, it is no surprise that paired application and integration platform solutions for mobile have begun to emerge.